About

Dr. Teresa Meehan’s Blog

Hello everyone and thank you for visiting my website.

I’m very excited to be creating in this space and to have the opportunity to share some of my deepest insights with an enlightened community. I believe one of our greatest gifts is being able to respectfully share ideas and diverse perspectives in order to see our sameness.

We’re all here (on Earth) for the same reason- to expand our souls.

For most of us, the process of expansion is not free of pain. It involves a multitude of trials and tribulations, including battles with addictions, mental illness, and physical ailments. Along with these battles can come great suffering.

The world has tried to respond to our human suffering by pouring billions of dollars into the development of pharmaceuticals that claim to remove any and all the discomforts we can imagine, but not without a cost. Often times the side effects of the medications are more debilitating than the initial complaint, yet the industry continues to expand world wide.

In the United States alone, 70% of all Americans take at least one prescription medication and more than half receive at least two medications. According to a recent study by the Mayo clinic, antibiotics, antidepressants and painkiller opioids are the most common prescriptions given to Americans. Studies show that more than 28,000 people died from opioids, which includes heroin and painkillers, in 2014, and 4.3 million people were taking pain medication for non-medical purposes that year.

In spite of all the medication production and usage, people are still in pain and many are suffering emotional, and sometimes physical, deaths on a daily basis. Traditional counseling models that emphasize talk therapy (Cognitive-Behavioral Therapy) have proven to have only a limited benefit, not because the “talking” model isn’t therapeutic but, I believe, because neither the counseling model nor the medical model has succeeded in addressing the root cause of the problem.

For the last several years, I’ve had the opportunity to work with people who, at the time of our encounter, were experiencing emotional crisis. Regardless of the situation, one feature has stood out among all of them, which I believe is the root cause of the majority of the suffering of the world. None of these people believed in their own inherent value or self-worth.

There is no amount of medication in the world that can change an underlying belief of worthlessness. Instead, people work to either hide the feelings by working tirelessly to prove their value to themselves or others, or, they turn inward and hide under a guise of intoxication.

Self-worth is a perception that is developed as a result of the messages we receive from others beginning very early in life. The feedback we receive through daily interactions is used to form the baseline of our value as a member of society. Although some feedback comes through physical gestures, the majority of it comes through verbal language as the prime means of communication.

Language is the voice of the mind. It is a reflection of the energy we hold in our consciousness and emerges as our thoughts, feelings, beliefs and behaviors.

The purpose of this blog is to share some of the ways in which language shapes everything we do, think and feel, and how we can use it to our benefit to create the joy and happiness we all desire.

I consider this blog to be a significant part of my journey as someone who has been formally educated in the fields of Linguistics and Psychology, who has worked one-on-one in the trenches with people in emotional crisis, and who has transcended much of my own emotional pain using the same techniques I plan to share here.

I invite you to JOIN our tribe of like-minded individuals who all believe we deserve to live a life of peace, joy and happiness. I promise I won’t inundate you with email messages, but I would like a way to stay in contact at a more personal level. Just enter your email address below and click on the Subscribe button. Of course, you’ll have the option to unsubscribe at any time.

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Dr. Teresa Meehan holds a doctorate degree in Educational Linguistics from the University of New Mexico. The title of her doctoral dissertation is “Prenatal Substance Exposure: Effects on Dyadic Interaction.” She was a tenured professor at New Mexico State University in Linguistics and Psychology from 1996-2006 when she left to start her own counseling and consulting business. She has worked in the mental health care industry in various capacities for over 20 years and continues to engage with clients as a professional life coach.